chapter 10: the passing of the years

I remember very little of that fateful party. I wish I could claim this has something to do with the years that have passed since then, but that would not be true. Alcohol flowed freely and wiped away memory as a river wipes away footprints on its sandy bed. What I do remember is piecemeal: a small collection of incomplete fragments. I remember the estate collapsing as Ruelli, gorging, simply outgrew it: her belly smashing down the front wall, her love handles and hips joining forces to take down the side-walls and her arse decimating the back wall. I remember guests from the town dancing and falling over, laughing. I remember Ruelli drunkenly displaying the philosopher's stone and getting everyone present to drink the strange chemicals it produced. I vaguely remember trying to argue against this, as making an entire townsworth of people immortal might have repercussions at some later stage. I remember Saffrona dragging me aside and telling me to let Ruelli have her way. I also remember a strange, erotic interlude involving myself and both women- though I may have dreamt it.

The important thing is that when the morning came, the world was a different place. The whole dockside town knew of the philosopher's stone and how to achieve immortality. Ruelli, meanwhile, was effectively homeless again: she had grown to such a degree that the residence she had inhabited was utterly destroyed by her expanding curves.

When the townsfolk had gone home, I scaled Ruelli's mountainous girth and lay on top of her (her soft, hot body served as a wonderful distraction from my pounding hang-over).
"Well," I asked, absently massaging her vast gut, "what do we do now?"
Ruelli smiled. "Now we sleep. We can come up with a proper plan later, when my head isn't killing me."

*

The events of the years that followed that evening were, for a short time at least, a matter of public record (though they later passed into the realm of folklore). Ruelli had become obscenely rich from her mines over the preceding year, and now she put her wealth to a use other than feeding her appetites. With her seemingly-bottomless funds, she constructed a palace of such demented proportions that it dwarfed even her... at least at first. What's more, she began giving out the elixir of the philosopher's stone with a generosity I found touching. Of course, it never reached much further than the nearby town and the villages connected to it by trade links- distance made a greater degree of distribution almost impossible.

Thanks to the wealth from Ruelli's mines and the vitality granted by the stone, the town became a city and the city became a sprawling metropolis... and all of it was focused on Ruelli, it's magnificent patron. She became something like a queen, with a merry court of grateful citizenry that constantly brought her gifts of jewels and- because she was Ruelli- fine food.

Fifty years passed and then a hundred, and Ruelli remained young (such was the power of the philosopher's stone). Of course, everyone in the city did- myself and Safrona included.

As the decades passed, Ruelli's excesses grew ever greater. Her appetite was insatiable and her love of luxury bordered on the obscene. As she grew ever fatter, she also grew ever more self-indulgent in her attitude towards wealth. She had the palace goldleafed and encrusted with rubies. She spent her days reclining in a solid silver throne, surrounded by a mountain of precious coins and glittering adornments. Her mines decimated the landscape for miles around as she sucked every drop of wealth from the earth, as greedily as she sucked every morsel of food from the local suppliers. In order to feed both herself and the rest of the local populace, it became necessary to use the elixir of the philosopher's stone on the crops of the surrounding farms (we discovered by accident that this encouraged vast and rapid growth).

Was Ruelli doing harm? The ripped-up landscape created by her mines would suggest so. The warped eco-system created by her liberal deployment of the philosopher's stone would suggest so. But the people of her city... that was a different matter. I have never encountered a group of people who were so content or happy with their de facto ruler. Ruelli was, on the whole, a kind and generous benefactor, and I do not believe, to this day, that she ever had a bad bone in her body. Of course, I would think that: she was and is the love of my life.

Inevitably, the day came when Ruelli's endlessly-growing body became too big for even the most ambitious palace; when her body began to impact the landscape itself. She remained soft and round and unmistakably feminine, but she grew to rival mountains in size, and her expanding body eventually crushed whole forests beneath it and created a vast, sagging crater in the land.

And still, it did not stop. She ate ever more and swelled to sizes I can scarcely describe. Her ambition turned the city into a kingdom and made a mockery of the surrounding environment.

'But where is the evidence of this kingdom today?' I hear you ask. 'Our archaeologists have never found any trace of a city of immortals lead by a giantess queen!' Well, they wouldn't have. Because the kingdom of the Baroness Ruelli is still very much alive and well. Ruelli's constantly-increasing weight caused an ever greater degree of... what do you call it? Subsidence? It doesn't matter: we ended up deep beneath the earth's surface. Our improbable kingdom is now housed in vast, diamond-encrusted catacombs of a scope you can't imagine. And in the darkest, largest chamber, Ruelli is still gorging herself and holding court.

You'll see us from time to time. We aren't monstrous subterranean things: we walk the surface quite often. After all, we need food and drink, and those things don't grow underground. We also need to keep up to date. We may be immortal and ancient, but we don't want to get left behind. Ruelli likes the Internet, for instance. I think she's on a site called 'Fantasy Feeder'.

THE END